Spatial offsets between interstellar bone-like filaments, radio masers, and cold diffuse CO gas, in the Scutum spiral arm

TL;DR

This study uses precise distance measurements to analyze the spatial relationships between interstellar filaments, radio masers, and CO gas in the Scutum spiral arm, revealing that certain filaments are located near the spiral arm's potential minimum and are offset from masers.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the spatial offsets and locations of interstellar filaments relative to masers and CO gas using improved distance estimates and spiral arm modeling.

Findings

Bone-like filaments are located near the spiral arm's potential minimum.

Filaments are offset outward from masers by about 200 parsecs.

Filaments are observed to be between 10 and 100 parsecs in size.

Abstract

The advent of more precise measurements of distance estimates for some objects (bayesian estimates for filaments, trigonometric estimates for masers) permits a better comparison of their relative locations, and a comparison with a most recent spiral arm model fitted to the diffuse CO 1-0 gas. Our results support the idea that some bone-like filaments, greater than 10 pc (labeled elsewhere as bones, mst, herschel) and smaller than 100 pc, are observed near the potential minimum of the Scutum spiral arm (bone-like filaments are offset outward from masers by about 200 pc).